200	Frameworks for Thinking

Classification by:	Values:	Practical illustrations
• three key dimensions:	• intelligence is	for teachers:
content, product and	multifaceted	• none
operations	and modifiable

Perry’s developmental scheme

Description and intended use

As director of the Bureau of Study Counsel at Harvard College from 1947, Perry decided to study ‘the variety of ways in which the students responded to the relativism which permeates the intellectual and social atmosphere of a pluralistic university’ (Perry, 1970, p. 4). Accordingly he devised in 1954 a measure called A Checklist of Educational Views (CLEV) which embodied the essential ideas of the scheme (dualism, multiple frames, relativism and commitment). The initial purpose was to enable undergraduate students to think about their own thinking and value systems and so to make progress.

All students participating in the study completed the CLEV and then volunteered to be interviewed towards the end of each year. The developmental scheme was fully worked out after analysis of 98 tape-recorded one-hour interviews, including complete four-year records for 17 students. Perry first published his scheme in a project report (Perry, 1968). The sample was later extended by another 366 interviews, including complete four-year records for 67 students. Only two of the 84 complete records were for women students. Trained judges reached high levels of agreement in assigning the interview transcripts to one of nine positions on the Chart of Development.

The following outline of the Chart of Development is taken from Perry, 1970, pp. 10–11:

Position 1 (strict dualism): the student sees the world in polar terms of we- right-good v. other-wrong-bad. Right Answers for everything exist in the Absolute, known to Authority whose role is to mediate (teach) them. Knowledge and goodness are perceived as quantitative accretions of discrete rightnesses to be collected by hard work and obedience (paradigm: a spelling test).

Position 2 (dualism with multiplicity perceived): the student perceives diversity of opinion, and uncertainty, and accounts for them as unwarranted

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confusion in poorly qualified Authorities or as mere exercises set by Authority ‘so we can learn to find The Answer for ourselves’.

Position 3 (early multiplicity): the student accepts diversity and uncertainty as legitimate but still temporary in areas where Authority ‘hasn’t found The Answer yet’. He/she supposes Authority grades him/her in these areas on ‘good expression’ but remains puzzled as to standards.

Position 4 (late multiplicity): (a) the student perceives legitimate uncertainty (and therefore diversity of opinion) to be extensive and raises it to the status of an unstructured epistemological realm of its own in which ‘anyone has a right to his own opinion,’ a realm which he sets over against Authority’s realm where right–wrong still prevails, or (b) the student discovers qualitative contextual relativistic reasoning as a special case of ‘what They want’ within Authority’s realm.

Position 5 (relational knowing): the student perceives all knowledge and values (including Authority’s) as contextual and relativistic and subordinates dualistic right–wrong functions to the status of a special case, in context.

Position 6 (anticipation of commitment): the student apprehends the necessity of orienting himself/herself in a relativistic world through some form of personal Commitment (as distinct from unquestioned or unconsidered commitment to simple belief in certainty).

Position 7 (initial commitment): the student makes an initial Commitment in some area.

Position 8 (multiple commitments): the student experiences the implications of Commitment, and explores the subjective and stylistic issues of responsibility.

Position 9 (resolve): the student experiences the affirmation of identity among multiple responsibilities and realizes Commitment as an ongoing, unfolding activity through which he/she expresses his/her life style.

Perry found that most students, although having different starting positions, went through the developmental stages in the same order. However, some got stuck for a year or more, some became alienated and escaped, and some retreated to Positions 2 or 3, still believing in absolute, divine or Platonic truth.

The principles and values underlying the scheme are clearly stated, and Perry provides a glossary of key terms. The dimension along which students were expected to progress was a purposive move away from authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1950) towards a synthesis

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of contextual pragmatism and existential commitment (Polanyi, 1958). For some this involved rejecting a literal interpretation of the Bible, but ending up with a renewed and more tolerant religious faith. The ideal is portrayed as the achievement of a courageous and creative balance between dialectically opposed intellectual and ethical influences, 20 of which are specified. Perry acknowledges a debt to Piaget and sees his scheme as in some ways going beyond Piaget’s framework by adding a ‘period of responsibility’ in which there are ‘structural changes in a person’s assumptions about the origins of knowledge and value’ (Perry, 1970, p. 229). The process is seen as a cyclical one in which people are driven by an ‘aesthetic yearning to apprehend a certain kind of truth: the truth of the limits of man’s certainty’ (p. 63).

Evaluation

Perry presents his scheme as a means of classifying ways of thinking and valuing, not as a set of skills. Nevertheless, the performances required of students are expected to be skilful and Perry clearly believed that higher-level intellectual and ethical positions were ‘better’ than lower ones.

The developmental scheme was drawn up in the specific context of two high-status American liberal arts colleges ‘where the teaching of the procedures of relativistic thought is to a large extent deliberate’ (1970, p. 232). The students took modular courses and almost half of the examination questions set in Government, History, English Literature and Foreign Literatures required consideration of two or more frames of reference. Perry was aware of the dangers of generalising beyond this particular social, gendered and historical context, but nevertheless believed that it would prove possible to do so. However, Zhang (1999) found that the Perry stages of cognitive development (as measured by her own questionnaire) showed little progression from year to year in her US sample and were reversed in one Beijing sample, demonstrating that cognitive–developmental patterns are influenced by different cultural and education systems.

The Perry scheme has in fact proved useful in other contexts, for example in the teaching of technology and chemistry (Finster, 1989 and 1991). Belenky and others (1986), working with female nontraditional adult learners, developed a stage model which has much

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in common with Perry’s scheme, while King and Kitchener (1994) developed a similar stage theory of reflective judgment which was intended for use in schools and colleges as well as with non-college students.

Perry’s scheme has the advantage of having clear definitions and providing a set of categories which, in his pioneering study, proved sufficiently comprehensive for the reliable classification of students’ oral accounts of their thinking and learning behaviour and of the values which inform them. Perry’s students were steered towards the kind of reflection required by completing a CLEV questionnaire, and later work showed that an essay or questionnaire can be used instead of a lengthy interview (Moore, 1988 and 1989).

While Perry believed that his scheme describes personal growth much more than responses to environmental pressures, he did acknowledge that individuals often adopt different positions in relation to academic, extracurricular, interpersonal, vocational and religious ‘sectors’ and even from one course to another. In his study, the move towards commitment tended to coincide with the realisation by students that after college they would have to earn a living, preferably in contexts in which intellectual, gentlemanly qualities were valued. The structure of the scheme is bound to reflect such pressures, as well as the assessment practices and expectations of college staff at the time. It was in the post-war years that many academics themselves abandoned religious beliefs for other philosophical or political lifestyles.

Perry acknowledges a philosophical debt to Dewey (1958) and Polanyi (1958), among others. However his scheme is compatible with an unusually broad range of Western philosophical and psychological positions, from Piaget to postmodernism and equally with Goffman’s (1959) sociological analysis of the self in interaction and performance.

Perry places great stress on courage and responsibility, as well as on the creative achievement of synthesis and balance in one’s life. When he speaks of stylistic balance between dialectical poles such as choice v. external influence; involvement v. detachment and self-centred v. other-centred, he expresses faith in ‘ultimately aesthetic’ standards (1970, p. 234). These values are explicitly stated and he sees ‘Escape’ or ‘Retreat’ as ‘a failure of growth or maturity’ (p. 199). As his scheme

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is concerned with the development of the whole person, thought, feeling and will all play a part.

The scheme was developed on the basis of phenomenological research, thereby grounding theory in lived experience. However, Perry did not approach his task without prior assumptions. He undertook the student interviews because he believed that thinking about thinking is a uniquely human capacity and would reveal generalisations at a high level of abstraction. What was revealed was a fundamental distinction between reflective and non-reflective approaches. The borderline is between dualistic and relativistic thinking and the step to Position 5 is taken only through reflective detachment. This borderline can be equated with Bloom’s distinction between lower and higher-order thinking and with the threshold of ‘critical thinking’. Moving from ‘relational knowing’ to ‘commitment’ is analogous to the strengthening of the Perkins, Jay and Tishman’s key dispositions or Costa’s ‘habits of mind’.

We can be confident about the basic structure of Perry’s scheme, even though it may need modification to accommodate other ideas such as Belenky’s ‘connected knowing’ and reversal theory (Smith and Apter, 1975; Apter, 2001). No evidence has been adduced to support the idea that the scheme charts a biologically-determined progression possible only at 16 plus. It is more helpfully seen as a model for explaining the personal and social construction of academically valued meanings, and is clearly compatible with Lipman’s conception of the development of critical and creative thinking through communities of enquiry.

Perry’s influence has been substantial. Among the many theorists who acknowledge a debt to him are Belenky, Kegan, King and Kitchener and Kolb. Mezirow’s ideas about transformative learning and critical reflection are in many respects indistinguishable from Perry’s (Mezirow, 1978; 1998). Perry has also inspired large numbers of practitioners, many of whom recognise from their own experience what the students in Perry’s book have to say (despite much of it being at a fairly abstract level).

It is above all the resonance that can be found between Perry’s ideas and those in other frameworks that make it attractive. For example, Biggs and Collis’ SOLO taxonomy maps very easily onto Perry’s

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scheme, with the SOLO ‘extended abstract’ level corresponding to Perry’s ‘commitment’ positions 7–9.

The Perry scheme has many potential uses in education and training: in planning, instruction and assessment. Perry himself listed selection, grouping, curriculum design, teaching method and guidance as areas in which the scheme could profitably be used. He saw it as encouraging openness, visibility and participatory inclusiveness in the practice of educators, recommending that, in the words of one student, ‘Every student should have an interview each year like this’ (1970, p. 240).

On the other hand it is far from clear that the ability to deal with ill-structured problems should be the be-all and end-all of higher education, let alone lifelong learning. There are many kinds of learning where skilful performance can be impeded by too much analytic thought, including a great deal of decision-making in the business world where intuitive thinking is often highly effective (Allinson, Chell and Hayes, 2000). Also there are many fields in which there are right and wrong ways of doing things, where procedures have to be followed, albeit with some flexibility and understanding. Perry’s scheme has the merit of encouraging independent learning through the appropriate questioning of authority, but would be misused if it led to the devaluing of all non-reflective procedural and routinised learning.

Summary: Perry

				Relevance for teachers
Purpose and structure		Some key features		and learning
Main purpose(s):		Terminology:		Intended audience:
•	to understand and	•	clear definitions	•	teachers
	facilitate intellectual		provided where	•	college students
	and moral growth in		needed
	a pluralistic society
Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	accessible and	•	education
•	conative		persuasive	•	citizenship
•	affective	•	good use of case
			vignettes